All week, the G-word has been rattling around the foreign ministries of the world, ever since US Secretary of State John Kerry announced that Isis was committing genocide against Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims.
But there’s a problem. These terrible atrocities are being committed on the very land and deserts upon which a far more terrible genocide of the Armenians was perpetrated just over a hundred years ago by the Turks, Robert Fisk, The Independent daily newspaper of Great Britain’s correspondent, wrote in an article.
“And Turkey – heaven be praised – is now our good friend, Nato ally and, since this month, our bastion against the Muslim refugee ‘invasion’ of Europe,” the paper also states. “All this, you see, is a bit embarrassing. The Yazidis and Christians of Iraq have certainly been massacred – including a few Armenian grandchildren of the 1915 survivors, although that hasn’t cut much ice in the US – although the Shia Muslims of Iraq were being slaughtered in Iraq by the thousand during the latter half of America’s military occupation. The Shia, I suspect, have been given a bloodbath upgrade to genocide because Shia Iran agreed to a nuclear deal with the rest of the world. But back to Yazidis for a moment.
“One of the worst genocides against this forlorn, centuries-old religion occurred in 1892 when the Turkish Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II targeted them for mass extermination. But the Sultan included among his victims tens of thousands of 19thcentury Armenians – whom Mr Kerry cannot bring himself to declare victims of genocide in the 20th century (although he did so for many years when he was a mere Senator). So earlier references to Yazidi extermination have to be left out of the Kerry narrative of history. The current Kerry mantra for the Armenian genocide is ‘one of the worst atrocities of the 20thcentury.’”
Fisk recalled that US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is going to be no help in all this.
“She regularly condemned the Armenian genocide until she became Secretary of State,” he added. “Donald Trump has not yet entered this particular blood-boltered ‘debate’ although his Trump hotel in Azerbaijan – a country which, like Turkey and (to its shame) Israel, denies the Armenian genocide – suggests that we shall be hearing from him soon.
“All in all, then a pretty mess. Kerry tells us that Isis is ‘genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology and by actions…’ as if the destruction of the Armenian people in 1915 was not – and is perfectly happy to label the dark forces of the ‘Islamic Caliphate’ as genocidal themselves – which they clearly are.
“The Americans are, in effect, blaming Isis for the genocide of a hundred thousand or more human beings while being too frightened to label the Armenian massacres of a million and a half souls as genocide lest it offend Isis’ sinister chums in Turkey.
“Forget it: 75 million visas to Turkey in response to their $3-billion European bailout to block those refugees is enough to keep the Armenian mass graves of 1915 well and truly closed.”
